Sometimes it takes an old guy to call out a youngster. Hatch knew that it was time for us to stop referring to Facebook as a tech company. As his spokesman reportedly noted later, Hatch was just using “a common tactic used in Congressional hearings to make a point.”Facebook runs ads based on the information it has collected about you. And it has used the imprimatur of “technology” to shift our attention so it — as well as Google — can operate under a different set of rules than all the other media companies that run ads. By clinging to its definition of being a technology company, Facebook and other social media companies enjoy protections under the Communications Decency Act that immunize them from being held liable for hate and other objectionable speech, libel and falsehoods in news stories and advertising that media companies do not.

To be sure, Facebook utilizes technology, but that doesn’t make it a tech company any more than Exxon Mobil (because it uses instruments to find oil) or Burlington Northern (because it’s based on the invention of the steam engine)."

David Dodson

For media companies that run ads, especially ones that use public networks, we tell them that they can’t lie or mislead, that it’s not okay to advertise cigarettes to children or push prescription drugs without including the risks. We have laws governing deceptive advertisements and Truth in Advertising laws. Companies that run ads can’t say a car gets 40 miles per gallon unless it’s true. They can’t say a movie won an Academy Award unless it did. If you say the wool comes from New Zealand, it must.Technology companies invent cars that drive themselves, satellites that can identify a license plate from miles away, phones that can guide us through traffic jams, and machines that see inside our bodies. That’s what tech companies do.

To be sure, Facebook utilizes technology, but that doesn’t make it a tech company any more than Exxon Mobil (because it uses instruments to find oil) or Burlington Northern (because it’s based on the invention of the steam engine).Zuckerberg’s genius was harnessing an already existing network and previously developed computer code to allow people to share words and pictures with one another. In return, he runs ads.

When nearly half of Americans get their news from Facebook, its newsfeed should be subjected to the same standards of fairness, decency and accuracy as newspapers, television and other media outlets.

For decades, CBS sold beer during weekend football games and toys during Saturday morning cartoons. Long before the internet, folks figured out that by targeting the right audience, they could charge a higher price for running ads. Facebook just does it better.

Google has been forced to shut down a data analysis system it was using to develop a censored search engine for China after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them, The Intercept has learned. The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top (...)

Over the last 30 years, the tech industry has seen a great boost and is at the fore of dedicated innovations and advancements around the world. The boom in tech has led to developments and created opportunities for millions all over the world. While beyond the skies is the limit for tech, and developers, #diversity — or rather, a lack of it is a growing concern. Software teams seem to be made up of primarily white and Asian men. Blacks, women, and Hispanics are largely under underrepresented.Interestingly, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter, according to the companies’ diversity reports are on an average 56% white, 37% Asian, 3% Hispanic and 1% black.Tech should be one industry where race or gender should take a secondary place. Skills, experience, and results are the primary interest (...)

Today The Country Is Mocking Politicians, They Should Also Be Criticizing #google’s CEOPhoto by Goran Ivos on UnsplashThe latest congressional technology hearing was as cringeworthy as you would expect.There were politicians who thought Google was the same company as Apple. There were politicians that wondered why Google was censoring hate-speech. There were politicians that thought Sundar Pichai’s salary and some aggressive alpha-male shouting would enable him to reveal the answer to the age old mystery of “is Google tracking our every step?”Confused? So am I.▻https://medium.com/media/58608e2d554e15682f2d4b0e332d5c9c/hrefThrough all the hardships, Pichai remained calm and collected. He provided insight to a group of politicians who clearly lacked expertise. This is difficult to do and I give (...)

To prevent Google from accessing her data, Janet practices “data balkanization,” spreading her traces across multiple systems. She’s used DuckDuckGo, sandstorm.io, ResilioSync, and youtube-dl to access key services. She’s used other services occasionally and non-exclusively, and varied it with open source alternatives like etherpad and open street map. It’s also important to pay attention to who is talking to whom and sharing data with whom. Data balkanization relies on knowing what companies hate each other and who’s about to get in bed with whom.

In 2014, the publication of a study from a Google-led AI research team opened up a new field of hacking called an adversarial attack. The techniques the paper demonstrated not only changed our understanding of how machine learning operates but also showed in practical terms how one of the most commercially promising and highly anticipated aspects of the AI revolution could potentially be undermined.This new attack surface proved so intrinsic to the basic structure of deep neural networks that, to this date, the best minds in AI research are having difficulty in devising effective defenses against it.This was no Y2K-style fixable programming oversight, but rather a systemic architectural vulnerability, which, barring new breakthroughs, threatens to carry over from the current period of (...)

Exclusive : internal document shows how Google employees are trained to treat temps, vendors and contractors Google staff are instructed not to reward certain workers with perks like T-shirts, invite them to all-hands meetings, or allow them to engage in professional development training, an internal training document seen by the Guardian reveals. The guide instructs Google employees on the ins and outs of interacting with its tens of thousands of temps, vendors and contractors – a class (...)

This Isn’t Pokemon — And Other Lessons from Crypto TradingNo Place for Sensitive HeartsI.Billionaire investor and superangel Chris Sacca regrets more on what he passed on than what he “failed” at. He had an opportunity to invest in the early team of DropBox, but Chris wrongly compared it to Google Drive and thought Google would crush it. He didn’t invest.He also stayed in an Airbnb before it went mainstream and had a similar opportunity, but felt that it was dangerous. “I felt someone would get murdered or raped there,” Chris said.Of course, that’s probably true; with scale, the sheer number of people using Airbnb (or any other large consumer service) are bound to result in some crimes. The risk of harm distracted him from the potential of the investment.There are over 2000 ongoing cryptocurrency (...)

The rise of politicians like El-Sayed, Omar, and Tlaib also undermines a core argument advanced by dictators in the Middle East: that their people are not ready for democracy. “People would not have access to power in their countries but they would if they leave; this destroys the argument by Sisi or bin Salman,” El-Sayed said, referring to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “What’s ironic is there is no way I would aspire to be in leadership in Egypt, the place of my fathers.”

American allies in the region also fear that the Democratic Party’s new Arab leaders will advocate for political change in their countries. Having spent millions of dollars for public relations campaigns in Western capitals, the Persian Gulf countries feel threatened by any policymakers with an independent interest in and knowledge of the region. They have thus framed these officials’ principled objections to regional violations of human rights and democratic norms as matters of personal bias. One commentator, who is known to echo government talking points and is frequently retweeted by government officials, recently spread the rumor that Omar is a descendent of a “Houthi Yemeni” to undermine her attacks on the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

The most common attack online by the Saudi-led bloc on the Muslim-American Democrats has been to label them as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, or more generally as ikhwanji, an extremist catch-all term. These attacks started long before this year’s elections. In 2014, the UAE even announced a terror list that included the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The attacks attempting to tie Omar and Tlaib to the Muslim Brotherhood started in earnest after CAIR publicly welcomed their election to Congress. One UAE-based academic, Najat al-Saeed, criticized Arabic media for celebrating the two Muslim women’s victories at the midterms, and pointed to CAIR’s support for them as evidence of their ties to the Brotherhood.

Most beautiful wedding photos taken at a nuclear power plant” might just be the strangest competition ever. But by inviting couples to celebrate their nuptials at the Daya Bay plant in Shenzhen and post the pictures online, China General Nuclear Power (CGN), the country’s largest nuclear power operator, got lots of favorable publicity.Recommended for You

What Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s visit to Congress taught us (spoiler: not a lot) A new AI method can train on medical records without revealing patient data The 6 reasons why Huawei gives the US and its allies security nightmares 250 pages of internal Facebook files were just dumped online—here are the 6 key takeaways The record for high-temperature superconductivity has been smashed again

A year later, the honeymoon is over.

For years, as other countries have shied away from nuclear power, China has been its strongest advocate. Of the four reactors that started up worldwide in 2017, three were in China and the fourth was built by Beijing-based China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) in Pakistan. China’s domestic nuclear generation capacity grew by 24% in the first 10 months of 2018.

The country has the capacity to build 10 to 12 nuclear reactors a year. But though reactors begun several years ago are still coming online, the industry has not broken ground on a new plant in China since late 2016, according to a recent World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

Officially China still sees nuclear power as a must-have. But unofficially, the technology is on a death watch. Experts, including some with links to the government, see China’s nuclear sector succumbing to the same problems affecting the West: the technology is too expensive, and the public doesn’t want it.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai came under fire from lawmakers on Tuesday over the company’s secretive plan to launch a censored search engine in China. During a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee, Pichai faced sustained questions over the China plan, known as Dragonfly, which would blacklist broad categories of information about democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest. The hearing began with an opening statement from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who said launching a censored (...)

Decentralized (censorship-resistant) video is about to transform our societyHow a new #blockchain project might free us from censorship“Two roads diverged in a [yellow] wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by…” — Robert FrostImagine two very different technology futures. In one, we continue on the same path of centralized video delivery platforms — a world where video is stored, transcoded, and distributed from mammoth data centers owned by Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Or another, where video is distributed across a network of decentralized nodes — a world where video (information) is not under the mercy of some single authority.The primary purpose behind this article — other than to present these two different futures — is to guide those readers unfamiliar with a new blockchain protocol, called (...)

With Google no longer an option, we decided to look for popular domains in censored regions that were on CloudFront instead. Nothing is anywhere near as popular as Google, but there were a few sites that used CloudFront in the Alexa top 50 or 100. We’re an open source project, so the commit switching from GAE to CloudFront was public. Someone saw the commit and submitted it to HN. That post became popular, and apparently people inside Amazon saw it too.

That’s how we got to the above email. Although our interpretation is ultimately not the one that matters, we don’t believe that we are violating the terms they describe:

Our CloudFront distribution isn’t using the SSL certificate of any domain but our own. We aren’t falsifying the origin of traffic when our clients connect to CloudFront.

However, in the time-honored tradition of sharing unpopular news late on a Friday afternoon, a few days ago Amazon also announced what they are calling Enhanced Domain Protections for Amazon CloudFront Requests. It is a set of changes designed to prevent domain fronting from working entirely, across all of CloudFront.Future

With Google Cloud and AWS out of the picture, it seems that domain fronting as a censorship circumvention technique is now largely non-viable in the countries where Signal had enabled this feature. The idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you’d have to block the rest of the internet as well. In the end, the rest of the internet didn’t like that plan.

We are considering ideas for a more robust system, but these ecosystem changes have happened very suddenly. Our team is only a few people, and developing new techniques will take time. Moreover, if recent changes by large cloud providers indicate a commitment to providing network-level visibility into the final destination of encrypted traffic flows, then the range of potential solutions becomes severely limited. If you’d like to help, we’re hiring.

In the meantime, the censors in these countries will have (at least temporarily) achieved their goals. Sadly, they didn’t have to do anything but wait.

What to do before, during and after writing your project proposal.Google Summer of Code is a global program which encourages students to work on a programming project with open source organizations during their break from university. If you do not know much about it, take a few minutes to watch this video, and read the official FAQ.Oh! This looks interesting. Excited to get started?But wait, how exactly do you go about this…I hope the following checklist helps you find your way. Let’s get going.Get a Head StartStart early, start nowWait, it has a summer in its name. Why start now? Stop thinking it is too early to start. Your aim should be to get to know communities, explore the projects they work on and build a genuine relationship with the members. Your efforts might end up in you spending (...)

You might have heard of the term “Algorithm” before, it is a process or set of rules used in calculations and problem-solving operations.Today, we will get an overview of different Google Algorithms that have transformed the search experience for us.Google’s mission statement is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.To achieve its mission, Google implements changes in its formula or the algorithm. Many changes are pushed by Google in a year, some are small improvements in their current algorithms and some just turns the industry upside down.So let’s take a look at all the important algorithms –1. Google PandaGoogle Panda was released by Google on February 24, 2011, and is used to detect duplicate, plagiarized content and excessive use of keywords.The (...)

An investigative journalist found that requests to unsubscribe from Macron’s En Marche mailing list were stored in a publicly accessible Google spreadsheet. The document contained 1,000 names, email addresses and even information on whether the voter threatened to contact CNIL. This practice violated Article 34 of French law mandating that personal data be stored securely and inaccessibly from third-parties.

None of the eleven 2017 presidential campaign websites were legally sound. An analysis conducted by a researcher at Angers University concluded that none respected CNIL’s requirements: informing visitors of the use of cookies, soliciting users for consent, and offering users the possibility to contest the use of cookies. Six candidate websites failed to fulfil any of these three legal obligations.

AI Now is a group affiliated with New York University that counts as its members employees of tech companies including Google and Microsoft. In a new paper published Thursday, the group calls on governments to regulate the use of artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies before they can undermine basic civil liberties. The authors write:

Facial recognition and affect recognition need stringent regulation to protect the public interest. Such regulation should include national laws that require strong oversight, clear limitations, and public transparency. Communities should have the right to reject the application of these technologies in both public and private contexts. Mere public notice of their use is not sufficient, and there should be a high threshold for any consent, given the dangers of oppressive and continual mass surveillance.

The AI Now researchers are particularly concerned about what’s called “affect recognition” — and attempt to identify people’s emotions, and possibly manipulate them, using machine learning.

Whale image on Pixabay10 years back it was Git that transformed the way software engineers worked. Half a decade back it was Docker that brought the container to the masses. Before Docker, the container was like a sacred secret in companies like Google and Heroku. Docker is a software and a company too. It tried to build a broader ecosystem but Kubernetes stole the thunder along the way keeping swarm at bay. This post is not about how some Docker tools are not popular. It is about how Docker has changed the way we work in the past 5 years.Whale Image on UnsplashTLDR;With Docker, you ship the whole stack not only your code. Allocate minimum required resources to containers then scale them horizontally. With containers security generally already comes baked In. With Docker and Kubernetes (...)

Let’s begin with better regulation, protecting workers, and applying “truth in advertising” rules to AI Today the AI Now Institute publishes our third annual report on the state of AI in 2018, including 10 recommendations for governments, researchers, and industry practitioners. It has been a dramatic year in AI. From Facebook potentially inciting ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, to Cambridge Analytica seeking to manipulate elections, to Google building a secret censored search engine for the (...)

Google Translate has previously displayed signs of gender bias by assigning genders to certain adjectives and words describing occupations. Thankfully, the company’s rolling out an update to fix this. The company said that after the update, Google translate will provide both feminine and masculine translations for gender-neutral words : Historically, it has provided only one translation for a query, even if the translation could have either a feminine or masculine form. So when the model (...)

For any business, an intuitive and user-engaging mobile app is their trump card. These applications broaden market reach and work their magic on every user.SayOne has been in the application development league for 7 years as of today. We have developed over 300 #seo-friendly applications for both the web and mobile including Google Play Store and App Store.But every time a customer approaches us with a mobile app need, their first question is ‘how can our business app stand apart from the rest of the 2 million app crowd present in App Store or Play Store?’.And our answer is ‘App Store Optimization or ASO’.App Store Optimization (ASO) for Business AppsA few months ago, Google conducted a survey to understand the mobile users’ journey starting from discovering new apps till using or abandoning it. (...)

Episode 14 of the Hacker Noon #podcast: An interview with Science Fiction author, and futurist Daniel Jeffries.Listen to the interview on iTunes, or Google Podcast, or watch on YouTube.In this episode Trent Lapinski and Daniel Jeffries discuss cryptocurrency, blockchain, AI, future #technology, and philosophy.“We need to stop throwing the damn baby out with the bathwater, and assume that decentralized everything just works because it’s decentralized.”“These things that we have now, they are still in their earliest phase. We barely understand them. They are going to evolve into something so mind boggling different from what we have today.”“We have to look to each structure, and abstract out the things that work and create new mitigation systems that solve the problems of the existing ones, and (...)